Dame Eleanor Hull

Welsh Zulu Chant

2008-07-21T15:15:00.002-05:00

Now I know what I heard singing: the Welsh, or maybe Wales itself. The conference ended (for me; I skipped dinner) with a performance by the Morriston Orpheus Choir. It was lovely. My parents always said there's no nation like Wales for choral singing, and I have a taste for it, as a former chorister myself. They did a grand job with the Zulu chant, but the songs that made me cry were the hymns I remember from childhood.

And "Speed your journey" was moving, in part because the choir members---at least, those performing tonight---were mostly elderly; the average age must have been seventy. The eyebrows of one gentleman looked quite fetchingly like white mice sitting on his glasses rims. I wonder if his grandchildren stroke them.

Now I have to try to pack for my trip home, including finding space for my new Morriston Orpheus Choir CDs. I want to thank the choir for a great evening. May you endure to the last.

I shall wear white flannel trousers

2008-07-19T17:29:00.002-05:00

I'm at the NCS conference in Swansea, and loving it. All the papers I've heard have been good, and Christopher Baswell's paper in the plenary session this afternoon was stellar. I've met old friends, fun people, and useful people (some of these categories overlap).

But the best thing is the beach. Less than a quarter mile away, just down a slight hill, across a 4-lane road, and through some bushes, the beach stretches for miles along the bay here. High tide comes quite close to the little tree-lined rise that separates beach from road, but this is a very flat beach: at low tide, the water is half a mile out. Seriously: it took me 10 minutes to walk out to where the water was, late this morning, and I'm not sure that was the lowest point of the tide. So it's no good for swimming, but lovely for taking your shoes off and walking along in the water, which warms up quickly in the sun, since it's so shallow. Lots of pretty shells get left behind, in good shape since they haven't been dashed against rocks.

I'm used to beaches along a continental shelf, where the drop off is steep, close in, and potentially dangerous, where finding undamaged shells is more of an event. Well, perhaps I'm no longer "used" to them, after my years in the midwest, but that's my archetype. This is very different. But it is saltwater, with seaweed, so it smells right, feels right. A saltwater beach is quite different from a Great Lakes beach.

I've heard some people complaining that this just isn't the luxury venue they expect for the NCS. I have no expectations; I'm not a regular at this conference. My feeling, however, is that if it's held in London, there had better be some really good stuff like dinner in the Mercers' Hall (or wherever it was that year), but in a place like this, all I ask is more free time so I can go listen for the mermaids. Something is singing to me out there.

Brigadoon

2008-07-11T15:23:00.003-05:00

Yesterday morning, Bodington Hall and its environs were buzzing with people. Last night, there were a handful left at dinner. They dwindled further this morning. Now the place is nearly empty. I'm still here because I had a manuscript to look at today, and since the Congress offered the option of staying through tonight, I took it.

I didn't have enough time with the manuscript, but then, one never does, when one is a North American coming to the UK on fishing expeditions. It's so hard to tell how much time you'll need with any one book. I liked this one better than most of what I saw at the BL. It gave a good sense of the interests of a group of people, probably family, including sense of humor: one of them liked to make anagrams both English and Latin of his friends' names, and then write verses about them. Some of the anagrams didn't seem to work very well. The writer introduced extra letters or left out repeated ones. But here's one I liked:

An anagramm upon Mr Richard Stacy, a present procurer under god of ease for the Gout: Stay a Rich Curde.

Of course now that I can't check on it I wonder about that U. This writer has lower-case a's that often open at the top, like u. And yet, given the gout, curd seems more likely than card.

Later in the MS, Stacy provides a recipe for the relief of hemorrhoids. It requires a lot of hog grease.

Random bullets of Yorkshire

2008-07-10T16:47:00.002-05:00

The excursions from the Leeds conference are really great. I saw Gawain country and two fourteenth-century manor houses (one restored, one ruined), plus Ripon Cathedral and a small chapel with fifteenth and sixteenth century effigies.
Ripon has some great misericords. I like the fox preaching to the poultry, the bear playing bagpipes, and St Cuthman wheeling his paraplegic mother about in a wheelbarrow (at least, that's the story about that carving that I choose to believe).
But some of the memorial tablets there are distressing. For example, two women who died in the eighteenth century, in their early thirties, after nine children apiece. One was 33, with 4 children surviving. Bad. One was 31, only 2 children surviving. Worse. What were their lives like?
At least one well-known medievalist from this side of the Atlantic needs a closer acquaintance with at least one of the following: (a) soap; (b) deodorant; (c) laundry detergent. Honestly, I am much less picky about body odor than many Americans. One or two of the above would probably be adequate. But dude, your research is teh awesomest but I totally don't want to smell you from four feet away kthxbai.
But then, maybe he's teh awesomest because he spends ALL his time on research and very little on effete wastes of time like showers and laundry. No wonder I am not teh awesomest.
I like English desserts because they're not too sweet. Tonight the dining hall had meringue with a dollop of sweetened cream and summer fruits (strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, red currants) on top, with pureed strawberries around the edges. The fruit was fully ripe. The meringue was crisp and melted fizzily. You could taste all the flavors, and enjoy all the textures. I don't usually like meringue, but this was outstanding.

I guess this isn't so random. There's a definite sensory theme running through the whole thing. But I certainly haven't the energy to make it either more or less random.

Blogging the Lost in Leeds

2008-07-08T15:47:00.002-05:00

I don't know if it's Google Maps, or English roads, or my map-reading abilities (not too shabby in the U.S.), but every time I carefully prepare for exercise by reading a map and working out where I want to go, I get lost.

It started in London, when I was trying to find a particular historically significant swimming pool. I looked at the map, I worked out what streets to take, and set out (jogging; I wanted to find the place first, and swim once I knew I could get there). The next thing I knew, I was at Blackfriars. Similar results the next day. The third day, I worked out what the problem had been, and also that by taking some of the streets I had got lost on, I could get there more quickly. So I got there; and then, trying to reverse direction, I got snarled up in a six-cornered intersection, turned the wrong way, and went back the longer, simpler way I had hoped to do in the first place.

In the meantime, I found a health club that was much easier to get to where I could swim.

This evening I headed out for a run. I wanted to be out for about half an hour; I worked out what roads to turn on so I could do a loop instead of straight out and back, and headed out the Otley Road.

Two and a quarter hours later, I made it back to my dorm room.

I hadn't counted on some small country roads (you hit country fairly quickly here) not having signposts with their names, or only partial names. (Fairly close to getting back, I thought I was on Air Foot Lane, like Airhead only the other end, but it turned out to be Stair Foot Lane when I got a full signboard.) It's true that a faulty sense of direction got me into most of the trouble, but that's partly because the sun is so far north at this time of year that trying to steer by it was my first mistake. I also hadn't realized that in addition to two golf courses north of here, there are two more to the west.

But it wasn't raining, at least, and a dogwalker helped me out when I finally asked for directions, and I'd had the sense to buy a sandwich earlier and leave it in my room so there was food when I finally got in.

And even though it took me in the wrong direction, I don't regret the footpath through the sheep pasture. (This was the point at which the run turned to a walk.) It was a really lovely ramble, and coming down through Adel Woods was even better.

But I'm not sure I'll be able to move tomorrow. The woman who falls asleep and then wakes up groaning during your session? That'll be me.

Magic Folio

2008-07-04T17:36:00.003-05:00

For about four hours today, the Percy Folio was mine.

I found out what I needed to know, and then I gave it back.

And spent another couple of hours at Lincoln's Inn, which is a fantastically beautiful place to work.

Then in the evening went to this.

Quite a happy fourth. Off to Yorkshire tomorrow. Has anyone arranged a Leeds bloggers' meet-up?

Magic helmet.

2008-07-02T10:42:00.002-05:00

Still no Percy Folio. There was "a cock-up" (how I love that phrase) at the library. British embarrassment ensued. I am now promised the MS for Friday, to celebrate Independence Day with, I guess. I'll let you have a look, if you stop by the Manuscripts Reading Room.

Plum pudding and the Percy folio

2008-06-27T15:55:00.002-05:00

No, definitely not both at once.

I'm here to work on a project I stumbled across a few years ago---not my usual line of country, but people have been interested in it and it got my institution to cough up funds for travel and transcription this summer. (If I finish early and spend some time looking at manuscripts related to my Real Work, well, that's just efficient use of my time and the university's money.)

So I have actually got through almost all the likely suspects here, with the exception of one manuscript that someone else has been using all week, and one other I thought I'd have to see in microfilm. And so I asked about microfilm of the Percy Folio. (PER-cy FOL-io!) Well, there isn't one. No facsimile, either. But I am already cleared to see select manuscripts, so, great, I just put in the request slip and went off to lunch.

I was feeling so delighted about getting to see the Percy Folio, which is a two-fer (current project AND Real Work) that I decided I'd have dessert, especially because one of the offerings was plum pudding. I'd never had it before, yet it seems like one of those iconic British desserts, I mean puddings, that you have to have sometime. It was very nice, not too sweet.

But the manuscript had not been delivered. The PERcy FOLio is on exhibition. So I had to fill out the form requesting that it be pulled just for petite moi next week, that is, at least 3 working days from now (when I had been wondering about going up to Oxford to get my paws on some more MSS related to the current project).

All this for something I'd be perfectly happy to look at in facsimile or microfilm. I mean, wouldn't you have thought that something in an exhibition would have been microfilmed or digitized?

Magic helmet. At least I enjoyed my plum pudding.

Random bullets of the British Library

2008-06-24T14:52:00.002-05:00

Archbishop Cranmer's lion heads have nice smiley faces.
In one manuscript from today, I found a pasted-in slip explaining the comments in "modern ink" on a particular folio as the work of a reader who was later convicted of malicious damage to the MS and sentenced at the Old Bailey to two months imprisonment, in 1891. You have been warned, I thought.
There sure are a lot of useful reference works I never knew existed. Indices to this, that and the other.
I had lunch with a medievalist I met at Kalamazoo . . . some year or other. I splurged on a big meal at the BL's restaurant, and it did make it easier to keep going the rest of the day.
The lunchtime medievalist has a room in a flat in East London. While it would be nice to be able to cook, I so do not want to spend time and money on the Tube. I hate crowds, and I love being five minutes from the BL.
There are many things I love about the density of London (excellent public transportation, for starters, even if I avoid it in peak hours) but being kept awake by young carousers outside is not one of them, nor is being awakened by yobbeaux (I think the offenders are French) thumping up the staircase and slamming doors late at night. (OK, that has nothing to do with either density or the BL. Work on topic sentences, Dame.) I keep telling myself that the nature of hotels is that their inhabitants are transient; thaes overeode, thisse swa maeg.
When I left tonight, I was walking near an elderly man who looked just like an ex-colonel out of Agatha Christie, except for the earphones. I don't know what he was listening to, but as he walked, he was declaiming in something that sounded rather like Old English. It certainly wasn't any of the modern European languages I know or recognize. I suppose it could have been something else entirely . . . but the stresses sounded so familiar . . . and yet, you know, it's simply TOO BL a sort of thing to happen. I probably hallucinated it. Not enough sleep lately.

Before I left

2008-06-22T16:28:00.002-05:00

Given this post, you would think my life before I left for London was quite complicated enough, with enough things to do. But no . . . I had to go and add a new kitten to the mix.

Sir John has wanted a new baby (or two) for awhile, and I have said no no no we have enough cats! So we did not go to the shelter and deliberately pick out a kitten (or two). No. I went to the library. Or rather, I was going to go to the library, but first I stopped at DD to get coffee for the drive. As I parked, I noticed an elegant young woman in a black dress, with heels, and thought how nice she looked. Then I realized she was accessorized with a small black kitten clinging to one shoulder while she worked her cell phone. Of course I stopped to admire the kitten. I am never able to coordinate my animals and my clothes so successfully.

She asked if I knew of any animal shelters in the area. She had just found this kitten on a very busy street corner, and wanted to find somewhere to take it; she had dogs that she thought would not be kind to it.

I know my duty to catdom when it stares at me out of a tiny kitten face. I said I'd take the kitten home.

Before I left, I spent as much time with him as I could. He is tolerably healthy, but is being treated for roundworms and a bacterial infection in his tum (not that either has slowed him down any; he's a hellion, and getting very bored in quarantine from our other cats). He is very social and good with people, so he wasn't feral before the elegant young woman found him. But he wasn't chipped, and I didn't see any signs posted about a lost kitten. So he's ours now.

He's named, more or less, for the research project I was trying to get to the library to work on.

Suitcases

2008-06-19T14:13:00.002-05:00

When I travel, I often don't bother to unpack. Most of my clothes aren't wrinkleable, or else they're meant to be wrinkled, and I don't mind rooting through my bag for them.

But I'm going to be in my current location for 16 more nights.

I filled up all the (few) drawers in my tiny room.

The BL was great again. Today's celebrity sighting: Bill Jordan. Since we're academics, should that be "celebrity citing"? I'll see if I can work him into my next conference paper . . . .

. . . gone tomorrow

2008-06-18T14:09:00.002-05:00

Actually, I'm already gone. I just don't believe it yet. But I have been in London for almost 12 hours now, of which 4 were in the BL, and now I'm in my tiny hotel room, on the top floor, staring out into the sea of green leaves stirring in the wind outside. My favorite place to write is staring out into treetops . . . and my favorite place to live is a city (some more than others, but city rather than countryside of whatever variety). It can be difficult to combine these preferences, but right now I am very happy.

People I know kept saying, "London! How exciting! You'll have such a great time!" and I would smile and say Yes, I will.

But I bet most of them were thinking, "Theater! Sight-seeing! Shopping! Night life! Historical atmosphere!" whereas my thought bubble read, "Get up early and go for a run! The reading rooms open at 10:00! Lunch at 1:00, then more manuscripts! Tea when they close up at 5:00, come back and work on other projects until 8:00! After closing, get a snack, call Sir John or do e-mail, fall in to bed, repeat until Sunday! What a wonderful life!"

Later than I think

2008-06-10T23:20:00.002-05:00

This turned into the semester that would not die, with incompletes and administrative tasks hanging on for some time. But at last I wrapped it up, and started thinking about settling into a summer routine, setting a pattern for sabbatical work that I can continue in the fall: half an hour of Greek study in the morning, then writing, some library time; should I go to the gym first thing, or use exercise as a break in the middle of the day? Of course, all this will be interrupted by summer travel plans, but it would be great to get into a groove.

Summer travel plans.

Summer travel plans! Today is . . . Tuesday . . . the tenth of June. In a week I will be on a plane to England. Hell's bells. So much for getting into a groove. I have to finish a conference paper, and make various arrangements for being away. I know I have time management problems, but I'm not usually this bad. Really. But it was a very turbulent semester, and it just started seeming like summer here, and I can't believe I'm about to be gone for over a month.

So. Who's going to be in London during the period mid-June to late July? Leave me a comment or e-mail me if you'd like to meet up.

It's all about the shoes

2008-05-17T17:19:00.001-05:00

I went to graduation this morning. I scored a seat in the front row, perfect for getting up to congratulate students I recognized as they came off the stage, and also giving an unobstructed view of the footgear. My students this term told me they knew it was important to wear interesting shoes to graduation, to keep the faculty entertained. So let's see what shoes stuck in my mind. (I did not take notes; this is purely what was memorable.)

There were many tasteful pairs of black high heels, some shiny, some open-toed, some serious spikes, some platforms. I also saw a lot of red patent leather, a few flats, some spikes, one dark red lizard print. High-heeled gladiator sandals were also popular, and there were several pairs of metallic gold pumps, as well as a glitzy silver-sequinned set.

Of my current students, the only one whose shoes I recall was a young man who always came to class in loafers and a leather blazer, but today was wearing olive drab canvas sneakers and a headwrap under his mortarboard (he does not have the kind of hair that needs to be wrapped to make it smooth). I don't know what that was about. Oh, and the double major (Art and English) wore her usual red ballet flats with jeans; it's her signature look, sort of Audrey Hepburn-esque.

A student from last fall had a lovely pair of sapphire blue suede heels, with a chunky heel. I added to my congratulations, "Nice shoes!" and she said, "Thank you! I wanted something special, and you know, there are so many people wearing shoes that just don't say 'Graduation.'" I had to agree. I don't care how many crystals and gewgaws you add, or how good your pedicure is; flip-flops just don't seem right for an occasion like graduation, in the opinion of this old fogey. In fact, I prefer closed-toe shoes rather than sandals for such an event, though I would accept a nice pair of peep-toe slingbacks. Someone wore such a pair, in a black-and-white spectator style.

Another black-and-white pair I liked were flats, a floral print. I noted a pair of sporty yet fashionable athletic-style shoes, in tan, on the feet of a woman probably in her fifties getting her bachelor's degree, and I thought, "There is someone who knows the value of comfortable feet, but she did get new shoes for this, all the same."

There were two pairs of high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes that stood out for color: one bright pink, one neon orange. I admired a pair of wedges where the top was brown and the wedge was a sort of houndstooth print in brown and cream. One young lady matched her golden yellow honors stole to golden yellow high-heeled sandals, with toenail polish a few shades lighter: that was impressive. And a doctoral student had very high-heeled leopard-print shoes, which stood out because usually the Ph.D.s wear much tamer (and often more comfortable) shoes: these students are older, busier, concerned more with substance than style.

Men usually don't have memorable shoes. One wore very pointy-toed shoes with a black-and-white chessboard effect; that got our attention. And I find I do not care either for tassels on men's shoes, or for patent-leather tipping on a plain leather men's shoe. If you must have patent leather, let it be the entire shoe.

My prize-winning most memorable: pink wedges, where the top was hot pink and the wedge was pink with white polka-dots.

Congratulations, graduates!

Bait and switch

2008-05-15T13:23:00.002-05:00

I feel like I should blog about the Zoo. I want to blog about the Zoo. But I am still working my way through a stack of graduate papers, unable to figure out why they are going s-o s-l-o-w-l-y. Apparently when I planned assignments so the undergraduate grading wouldn't be too bad at the end, I missed something on the grad side.

It's probably partly fatigue. The weekend before Kalamazoo, I was at another conference. Different papers. Neither one wanted to lie down and behave itself. I think I'm looking at my second book in this snarl, actually. That really makes me feel like powering through the first one this year, so I can get on with the next project. But anyway, all the traveling and thinking was tiring. And aside from the grading, I have one more significant administrative project to complete before I can really feel my sabbatical has started. It landed in my lap this week. Well, it really is my job, I understand that, but everyone had forgotten about it.

And I want to be done.

And I want to be able to think about some of the great papers I heard at the Zoo and about some of the stuff that happened before it all fades in the noise of grading and admin.

Maybe a random-bullets-of-Kalamazoo post. Not now. Either when the grad papers are done or when the deadline is past so I'm doing manual change-of-grade forms anyway.

Analysis 6: conclusion

2008-04-27T15:15:00.001-05:00

I don’t feel I gave up much. I would like a little more time for hobbies, but my interests outside of work are not passions, not things I need to have central in my life. I don’t want to give the impression that I work all the time, because I don’t—I aim at 40 hours a week, on average—but work is what shapes my life.

Perhaps the work/job distinction should be explored. I certainly count research as work, not as something I’d do anyway—I mean, it is, but since it’s an expected part of my job, research is work in the daily sense. But then there’s The Work, what to some extent I chose over The Life, because I felt the need for work that was a vocation, work that helped make life meaningful. At one point when I was in graduate school, some of my non-academic friends, and their academic mother, were reading Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life; they found the idea that women were likely to put together a series of lives consoling. It was what the mother had done, and my friends, unsure of what they wanted to do, hoped form would emerge out of patchwork for them. I saw myself with a more traditionally masculine trajectory, and that is (so far) what has happened. I didn’t seem to have the experience of being broken down and re-formed in grad school that some of you report, perhaps because I wasn’t firmly formed when I started. I got to grow into the identity I had long desired, rather than losing pieces of myself.

And though I chose The Work, I have A Life. I have a really good job. Most of my colleagues are sane, most of my students are nice, smart people who work hard, the library is decent, the location is acceptable. My house, which I can afford and which is in a good neighborhood, is filled with books and cats and sunlight. I am very happily married. I have access to the cultural amenities of a big city and to the intellectual life of my campus, both of which get some of my time. I have friends, and some of them aren’t even academics.

I don’t have everything I want. But if, when I was 20, a fairy godmother had said, "Look, you can have work and love but you’ll have to live your life in exile; or else you can live in a place you love and take your chances on the rest," I would have thought that was a no-brainer. In fact, I’d make the same choice now.

A tiled patio over whose white walls tumble jasmine and bougainvillea, shaded by a pepper tree, whispers the fairy godmother. Geraniums that grow into hedges, lantana that grows tree-sized. Plumeria. Wisteria. Mountains. La la la not listening, I say. La la la love my work.

It’s hard to know what matters to you till you lose it. And if you lost something else, that might be the thing you truly can’t live without. The path not taken doesn’t exist. The only path is the one you’re on.

What I have is what I wanted most.

Analysis 5: Health

2008-04-26T08:22:00.001-05:00

Again, it depends on where you stop telling the story. I find I’m reluctant even to start this one. I seem to be fine now. Around the time I got tenure, though, I had a series of injuries and stress-related ailments that took years to resolve. Much time spent seeing different doctors and physical therapists. Much research time lost. Much wondering whether I would remain impaired for the rest of my life.

It started with a broken rib, sustained when I fell onto a trailer hitch while trying to get a good picture of a pageant wagon in York (see, work-related). I was reasonably active up till then, as time allowed, but exercising with a broken rib is painful. Recovery was slow. I had to become more assiduous about exercising than I had been.

When I thought I’d made a comeback, I injured my shoulder, which provoked symptoms that were misdiagnosed as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, despite my insistence to doctors that it all started with this shoulder thing . . . . This one’s harder to call, because the diagnosis was work-related, but the shoulder injury may or may not have been related to work ergonomics. At any rate, it’s hard to recover from an injury that’s being treated as a different kind of injury entirely.

On top of the years of pre-tenure stress (and job-market stress, and relationship stress previously recounted, and other grad school stresses my readers no doubt can easily imagine), the physical stresses and pain—I believe—contributed to various other problems. I don’t want to recount them here. Like I said, I’m fine. But a couple of bloggers I keep up with have reported, this spring, on health anxieties that were very familiar to me from personal experience. I know what procedures you’d go through for diagnosis, and how it feels while you wait for results, and how you research stuff on the web, thinking about what might happen and how much time or physical ability you might have in various scenarios and what you’d do with it.

So, as with the long-term relationships, if we stop the story now, it ends well. Of course, in the long term, we’re all dead. And maybe you consider that even a few years of injuries, pain, ailments, and doctors means that I did, in fact, give up my health for my job. Now I work at staying healthy, as I did not pre-tenure, because I know that the expense of time and energy on exercising and getting good food at regular intervals is far, far less than the expense of not getting exercise or eating right. And that sounds like a sermon, which I didn’t mean to give.

Analysis 4: Children

2008-04-25T09:01:00.000-05:00

This is more what it looks like to others than how I feel myself. I never much wanted children, though I also always thought that I might, eventually, change my mind. The grad school boyfriend (see #3) wanted children, and so I thought I could see my way to it, someday, eventually, if everything worked out. But I didn’t really think through, then, what would be necessary in terms of time, arrangements, type of job, location and cost of living, all of that—especially energy and time.

After we broke up, I realized that I really did not want to have children, for many reasons. This became a problem with most potential partners until I met Sir John. He was flexible on the issue, which meant he could accept my wishes. Later, when I felt more flexible, he had decided he was happy as we were, and in turn I accepted that, quite easily, really. Now that it’s too late (well, probably, and yes, there’s adoption), I find babies and small children look much more attractive to me than they used to. And yet I don’t really like being around them for very long, and I don’t know where we would put a child—not in terms of physical space, but in the shape of our lives. It’s not as if we have swathes of time we don’t know what to do with. We both work a lot, we both have fairly substantial commutes, we’re used to routines that would have to change a lot to accommodate a small person. And having been the child of older parents, I think there’s a lot to be said for not having parents more than 40 years older than their kids. In some ways, I wish we’d had a kid years ago, but looking back, I can’t see when would have been a good time any more than I can see how a child would fit into our lives now.

Bottom line: I know I would not be a particularly good parent, though I sometimes feel I should have had a child. I’m a thinker, not a feeler, so what I know wins out. However, I recognize that some people see me as having sacrificed motherhood to career, and I am aware of possible alternate lives in which this would have come out differently.

I do like being old enough that no one asks any more when I’m going to have a baby.

Analysis 3: long-term relationships

2008-04-23T09:14:00.002-05:00

I’m married now, so this doesn’t look like something I gave up. But I married Sir John when I was 40. That gave me time for a number of long-term relationships, all but one of which foundered, for assorted reasons.

I won’t even go into anything pre-grad-school, except to say that my focus and ambition in college seemed off-putting to many of the young men I knew then, and that I was myself ambivalent about marriage at that time. I wanted a close relationship, but I feared falling in love with someone who would want a capital-W Wife, not a partner, someone who with good and loving intentions would protect me from risks, change, travel, and growth.

In graduate school, for five or six years I was in love with a man who wound up leaving with an M.A. and getting a high school teaching credential. That could have been perfect for us as a couple, and I had high hopes as I entered the job market that I’d get a position in a region he’d consider desirable. But I didn’t. In hindsight, it wouldn’t have mattered. If I’d got a job in the city where he settled, he would have come up with some other reason not to commit. My focus and ambition put him off, too. He wanted more play time, and a wife whose job could be left at work. Having him around did loosen me up a bit and meant I had more fun in grad school than I might otherwise have done, while he probably got more work done with me around than he would have without me. At any rate, when I started my first job, I certainly felt that I had sacrificed love to career. But I could do no other. My work was very important to me—more a vocation than a job.

I made that quite clear to the next boyfriend, someone who had had a crush on me for awhile. Given the timing, it was clear that we would have either a fling or, after two months, a long-distance relationship. I would have been fine with fling, but he wanted relationship. Well, okay. I guess. Here’s what you should know about the academic job market and the tenure process, to understand why I am going to have to concentrate on work about the way I concentrated on the dissertation. . . . Somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas, he told me I was cold, hard-hearted, selfish and obsessed with my work. I was baffled. "But I told you all that six months ago," I said, and broke up with him.

My job is in a smallish town where there is not much social life for anyone over 22. One of my friends, in a similar position, went to EVERY campus event and met her husband at a reception for professors who had recently published a book. That approach didn’t work for me. I was probably ambivalent about getting involved with another academic. Certainly I see a lot of advantages in having "married out," as it were. But for awhile, anyone else I met was put off by the Ph.D. When I moved to the suburbs of the nearest city, I dated some men with medical degrees, and a photographer who thought of my work as a creative job comparable to his. At that point, I stopped feeling that I’d never find anyone, because clearly there were presentable candidates.

It’s all in when you stop telling the story. I had a few bad years in there. This does not compare to people who are tenured in tiny remote towns where moving to the nearest city would require driving three hours or more one-way. But it’s not like I’m a Smug-Married-at-22, either. I have a colleague who started graduate work in her 40's, after another career. She treats the long-distance relationship that entailed as no big deal—she'd been married for 20 years, her children were nearly grown, it revitalized the marriage. I'm the other way around. Long-distance? Been there, done that, epic fail. Now I want to be with Sir John.

London lodgings

2008-04-22T13:17:00.003-05:00

We interrupt this series of self-indulgent musings to bring up a question: does anyone have any experience with/knowledge of Hughes Parry Hall (and associated student halls) at the University of London? I'm trying to sort out a trip next summer (got my start through Dr. Virago's posts from last February, thanks for those!).

Analysis 2. Choice of where to live:

2008-04-22T10:32:00.001-05:00

My feelings about this one have see-sawed considerably over the years. I knew when I started that I’d be lucky to have a job, anywhere. During adolescence, I thought exile was romantic, and I kept that attitude for awhile, reading Lorrie Moore characters with a positive spin. I wanted to get a good long way from the people I grew up with, and stay there; grad school took me away, and I didn’t want to go back. What’s more, I had a strained relationship with my family, who moved away from our home state while I was in grad school, so I was happy to get a job a long way from them, as well as from home state. It meant I didn’t have to come up with reasons not to visit. Too far, too expensive, that was simple. I hoped for a job in a particular region (more about that will follow), but that didn’t pan out. Where I am suits me well.

Still, the older I get, the more I miss my home state. I lived there all my life before graduate school, and the climate and plant life still seem "right" to me, as twenty-plus years of "real seasons," bulb flowers and hardwoods do not. I have lost touch with the friends from high school that I wanted to leave behind. I am now secure in my identity. I’d love to go home, but I’d have to change professions to do that, and I do love my job. There really are no comparable jobs in my home state—the choices would be a much more high-powered institution (not likely), or a significantly higher course load (not desirable, even with palm trees).

Also the older I get, the older my parents get. I don’t like their part of the country either, but if I had a different kind of job, I think I might plan to move much closer to them for, say, five years, and then move on—either back where I am now, or try to go home after they die. As an academic, I don’t have that option. I’m here for good, unless I leave the profession, or turn to adjuncting (right out), or go into administration (still a bit of a gamble as to place, though there are slightly better opportunities to move). I’ll have to rely on FMLA if there comes a time when I really need to be near my parents for awhile.

One thing really helps me, though, and that’s that I chose this life. I didn’t choose where I’d live, but I made a very deliberate choice to leave where I grew up and accept whatever the job market doled out. I am old enough (and my parents are old enough) that I was brought up to marry, not to have a career (aside from some qualifications "to fall back on"). My mother hoped that I would marry a professor at the local university, live in a big beautiful old house, have some babies, and see her all the time. Many of my high school friends stayed in town for college, as did I, so I remained enmeshed in relationships it might have been better to leave behind sooner. In particular, my high school boyfriend and I couldn’t seem to stay broken up, in part because of the way our break-ups affected the dynamics in our group of friends. Having seen similar effects among some of my students, I think if I had stayed home, we might well have wound up married and unhappy. When I left to cross the country for grad school, I was terrified and at least part of me felt that I was ruining my life. The path of least resistance would have been to stay and do what I was brought up to do or whatever most of my friends were doing. And I chose otherwise. I’m proud of that. I have a life I made, not the life someone else expected of me.

What did I give up?

2008-04-21T10:44:00.001-05:00

Inspired by Squadratomagico and others, here’s a list of what I might seem (to myself or to others; at one time or another) to have given up for the sake of my chosen career. We all know that a story may be comic or tragic depending on where the narration stops, so I follow the list with analysis. Not all of these items involve true sacrifice, and on some my point of view has changed more than once.

Money (salary, savings)
Choice of where to live
Long-term relationship
Children
Health

1. Money. Obviously getting a Ph.D. in the humanities and teaching is not the path to riches. I knew that going in; I grew up in a college town, after all (as I said in "Ink and Valium"). You spend years living on a TA’s stipend, unable to save, and when you do start making a proper salary, it may not keep pace with inflation. This matters to me more now than it did when I chose graduate school, because I understand money better now. At the time, what I wanted was interesting work, the life of the mind, to spend most of my time reading and writing. My family always lived frugally, so I knew how to get by on very little; the secure salary of a tenured professor, compared to the ups and downs of my father’s income, appealed greatly to me.

My chosen career path was the biggest chance I ever took. I am not a gambler. Security motivates me more than adventure. Looking back, it is obvious that a much safer choice would have been to take a couple of business classes as electives, and then to have looked for jobs with companies where my languages and head for numbers would have been appreciated. I think I could have found interesting work I would have enjoyed, with possibly less stress and certainly more financial security. And I could have gone back to school around 30, had I decided to, with a financial cushion.

It has worked out well enough, partly because I got my way paid through grad school. I did have the brains to decide I wouldn’t go into debt for a humanities Ph.D. I had trouble saving in my early teaching years, anyway, partly because of the siren calls of travel and books, and I’m not proud of that. I knew better, but I didn’t act on what I knew about managing money. Then I married Sir John, who is not an academic and makes more than I do. So, though I intended more independence, I wound up being "rescued" financially by marriage, which is not a good feminist position. I think, now, if you choose a low-paying job like the professoriat on purpose, you should resign yourself to living like a graduate student at least until you get tenure, so you can pay a lot into a retirement account early and get some compound interest going.

I’m doing fine now, thanks more to luck than anything else. But really, money matters more as you get older. It’s one thing living on a shoestring at 25, and another entirely at 50. I don’t have regrets, but I wish I had thought more realistically about money when I went into this field.

Tune in tomorrow for analysis #2.

Ink and Valium

2008-04-18T23:18:00.002-05:00

Poking around assorted blogs, I saw a link to this one. Only I mis-read it. Now I want to have a blog called "Ink and Valium."

I grew up in a college town. When I was a teenager, I sometimes babysat for a family whose paterfamilias worked at the local Uni. Lots of people I knew worked there, so I didn't pay much attention . . . until I was in graduate school, and Mr. Paterfamilias turned out to be a Very Fancypants Scholar. Like, not just Mr. Paterfamilias, but MR. PATERFAMILIAS. You've heard of him. And I remembered discovering that his medicine cabinet harbored his prescription for Valium.

Of course, it could have been for back pain or something. But I can't tell you how much it has consoled me, over the years, to believe that Very Fancypants Scholars suffer from anxiety and pre-tenure nerves like all the rest of us.

That's my Ink and Valium story.

Objects

2008-04-04T22:07:00.004-05:00

For the love of God, people: after a preposition, you need object pronouns.
"A picture of Liz and me." Not "a picture of I." Right? If there's someone with you, you still use "me."
"You're with Bob and me."
"Between you and me."

It's not just the students. I've seen and heard my colleagues doing it. English professors. I'm going to start issuing tickets.

Dagnabbit

2008-04-04T18:49:00.002-05:00

That easy-to-write conference paper I was happy about in February? On looking over the rough draft, it appears that the real issue is more or less the opposite of what I was trying to argue . . . and what the on-line abstract says my paper will do.

Of course it's not the first time a scholar will go in and say, "So, this paper changed direction since I wrote the abstract," and it won't be the last. But dagnabbit anyway. I thought that paper was more or less in the bag, and a good thing too, since I have another one that is not going so well. Now I have to revise the one extensively while figuring out something (anything!) to say in the other.

The good news . . . I wrote 2500 words today. The bad news . . . they're all comments on student papers.